longer the highest-priced show on net-work TV—it now shares that title with“Sunday Night Football.”A weakening “Idol” is bad news forMadison Avenue. There simply is noalternative with similar reach and rat-ings. If “Idol” were to go away, advertis-ers would be forced to spread their dol-lars around ore. It might also rejiggerthe investments they make with eachnetwork, because “Idol” advertisersoften get their ads in the show as part ofa larger Fox package.

“I don’t think it’s as simple as figuring out what other programs are the
alternative,” said Christine Fuller, managing director-media investment at
WPP’s MediaCom.

“Idol” ratings declines this year are
bigger than what Fox executives anticipated, said one executive familiar with
the network. Even Chase Carey, second-in-command of Fox parent News Corp.,
has taken notice, admitting at a recent
investor conference that “the ratings
aren’t where we would have hoped.”
The program is in need of “fresh energy,” the deputy chairman and president
of News Corp. added.

Softer ratings could give buyers anegotiating tool during the upfronts,when TV networks hope to sell most oftheir ad inventory for the coming fallseason. If the “Idol” ratings situationbecomes more pronounced, advertisersmay push back against the rates Foxseeks for the show and “look at the over-all Fox mix,” said Ms. Fuller. “They stillare the No. 1 show in their time periodon Wednesday night, but not by themargin they have been in the past.”On the other hand, there are few

MICHAEL BECKER/FOX

other places for “Idol” advertisers to go,
just as there wouldn’t have been much
of an alternative for marketers reliant on
football had there been an NFL strike.

Revitalizing the program is therefore crucial for both Fox and marketers.
Fox runs “Idol” about three hours a
week for half the season; the show
accounts for about 20% of its 15 prime-time hours each week January through
May. While “The X Factor” will return
this fall and is viewed as a sort of heir
apparent to “Idol,” the new show’s ratings are not close to the 20 million
mark.

Advertisers, meanwhile, need “Idol”because only a handful of traditionalprime-time shows on broadcast TVcommand such attention in this age ofsplintering audiences and new media-consumption devices.“Idol” charteradvertiser AT&T declined to commentwhile another, Coca-Cola, said in astatement, “We continue to believe inthe show as a great way to communi-cate with our core consumers.”Knives have been out for “Idol” foryears. Last year, CBS tested a dancecompetition featuring Paula Abdul onWednesdays opposite “Idol” (it failed tocatch on). And NBC’s decision to holdoff on a fall launch for the second sea-son of “The Voice” and run it with“Idol” in the second half of the seasonspeaks to an increasing vulnerabilityfor the older program.

Fox’s veterantalent show hasbeen tops on TVfor the past sixseasons . Butmuch like “Idol”judge StevenTyler, the show isstarting to showgray in its 11thseason. As ofFeb. 26, moreviewers in the18-to-49 demotuned intoNBC’s“The Voice.”

known until the final third of the season, when audiences grow more enthusiastic about particular finalists. And
“Idol,” which on a combined basis
attracts 19. 8 million viewers, isn’t
primed to vanish (The last show to draw
that number of viewers in its 11th season was CBS’s “Murder She Wrote”
nearly 20 years ago.)

There is no lack of ideas for moving
“Idol” forward. Ms. Fuller would like to
see a better rapport among the judges
and suggested the practice of using
“auditions to showcase people with not
as much talent” may have run its course.
And at Fox, the network is not complacent about its flagship show.

Even so, “Idol” once walked alone
among TV shows. Now it has company.

Facebook tells marketers socialat scale will not come for free

FACEBOOK from p. 1

ended with cocktails under the life-sizereplica of a blue whale in the Museumof Natural History and a performanceby Alicia Keys. There, Facebook sug-gested that marketers reorganize them-selves around social. It produced ahandy playbook with a proposed orga-nizational chart for marketers thatadvises creating a position to “overseesocial across the organization” (andreport directly to the chief marketingofficer) as well as a “pages team” dedi-cated to Facebook. It also suggested aterminology in which Facebook ads willno longer be “ads” but “stories.”Audacious, yes, but Facebook, nowon its way to a public offering, has builtincredible scale as well as engagement.In the U.S., it ranks No. 1 in time spentand ad impressions and No. 2, toGoogle sites, in total internet visits. Nodoubt some marketers will restructureto take advantage of it, just as theyretooled to take advantage of search.

“We’re going to see the emergenceof quite different organizationaldesigns over the next few years,” saidNigel Morris, CEO of Aegis MediaAmericas, which is a member ofFacebook’s client council of top brandand agency partners.

For more on the
latest Facebook
changes, go to
AdAge.com/digital

proclamation Facebook has madeabout advertising. In 2007, it sum-moned the ad community to an eventwhere CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then24, announced: “The next hundredyears will be different for advertising,and it starts today.”But in the nearly five years since, apersistent undercurrent has been thatFacebook’s attitude toward advertisingverges on intolerance, as the companyhas mostly relegated ads to the rightrail and kept them small, innocuousand, as some researchers assert, inef-fective—largely because the reach islimited to fans and their friends.

That appears to be changing with
last week’s news of premium ads, long-awaited mobile ads and ads on the log-off page. (Advertising on Facebook’s
massively trafficked log-on page remain
off-limits to marketers, however.)

“These new ads are the first indication that being publicly traded will
reset the balance between users and
marketers in a marketer’s favor,” said
Chris Wexler, director-strategy at
Campbell Mithun. “Don’t expect
MySpace 2.0 anytime soon. But you
will see marketing messages continue
to invade what has been a largely ad-free place.”